A 29-story office tower in the heart of Philadelphia's Market West corridor that sold for a fraction of its previous price last year just landed a record-setting loan to fund its comeback. Citadel Credit Union has closed a $50 million commercial real estate loan for 2000 Market Street, the largest commercial loan in the Exton-based credit union's history, backing the ownership group's push to fill vacant space in the roughly 665,000-square-foot tower.
The loan refinances debt tied to the building's August 2025 purchase, when a joint venture between CSB Holdings LLC and Tide Realty Capital acquired 2000 Market Street for $45.5 million, according to citybiz. That price marked a steep 64% discount from the $125.4 million that previous owners Nahla Capital and Goldman Sachs paid for the same tower back in July 2018, per Commercial Observer. In per-square-foot terms, the building traded for roughly $68 last year compared to about $189 in 2018, underscoring how far Center City office values fell before this recapitalization.
How the New Loan Replaces the Old Bridge Debt
Citadel funded $36 million at closing, with another $14 million available as the ownership group hits leasing milestones and completes tenant improvements, citybiz reports. The financing replaces a $34.125 million acquisition bridge loan that Maxim Capital Group had provided in August 2025, while also creating a credit reserve earmarked for future leasing, the same report notes.
Citadel's chief lending officer, Michael DeSimone, said the deal shows the credit union's ability to move at institutional scale without losing its local touch. Citadel, he said, can close complex opportunities at greater scale while retaining local knowledge and responsiveness, according to citybiz. Chris Hansen, the commercial relationship manager who led the transaction for Citadel, said the financing solution supports the property's current needs and future lease-up.
A Tower Climbing Back From a Major Tenant Exit
Occupancy at 2000 Market Street has risen from about 67% at the time of the August 2025 sale to roughly 77% by late August 2026, driven by 65,000 square feet of net new leases and renewals over the past year, per the Commercial Observer report. That recovery follows a rough patch: the building's vacancy spiked after law firm Fox Rothschild vacated 133,000 square feet in late 2024. Anchor tenant Marshall Dennehey has helped stabilize the tower, renewing its headquarters lease in January 2025 for 10 years and 120,462 square feet — even as the firm trimmed its footprint by more than 13,000 square feet to modernize its operations, according to Marshall Dennehey. The firm has kept its primary office in the building since 2012.
The ownership group has also poured $10 million into ongoing construction and tenant improvement projects at the tower, the Commercial Observer report notes, with a portion of Citadel's secondary $14 million tranche tied directly to finishing that work. Built in 1973, the 435-foot tower is tied for the 17th-tallest building in Philadelphia and features column-free floor plates of roughly 26,000 square feet, per Wikipedia.
Betting Against the Residential Conversion Trend
Notably, the ownership group chose not to convert the tower to residential use — a path several competing Center City buildings have taken amid the office downturn. The August 2025 sale was reportedly the largest post-pandemic Center City office sale completed without plans for residential conversion, according to Connect CRE. Tide Realty Capital, based in Maryland, is led by founder and president Aaron Loeb, who said Citadel structured the financing around the ownership group's plans for the property's next stage, per citybiz. New York-based CSB Holdings, which has been acquiring and modernizing commercial properties across greater Philadelphia, worked alongside brokerage Two50 Capital Group — led by Adrian Edery and Sara Frankel — which served as commercial financing broker on the deal.
Leasing Momentum Across Center City
The bet on 2000 Market Street lands amid a broader uptick in Center City leasing. Total office leasing activity in the district reached a six-year high in 2025, with deal volume up 10% year-over-year and total square footage leased jumping 61.8% to 1.7 million square feet, even as overall central business district vacancy hovered near 20%, according to the Center City District. Not every Center City story has been as upbeat: Hoodline has reported on Audacy's HQ exit, and the neighborhood's shifting commuter foot traffic contributed to CookNSolo shuttering six Federal Donuts and Goldie locations earlier this summer. On the leasing side, though, 2000 Market Street counts at least one high-profile tenant: WhiteHawk, which lists its corporate headquarters in the tower, priced its $200 million IPO in June. According to The Philadelphia Inquirer, office vacancy rates were 20.4% in Philadelphia and 20.8% in the suburbs, underscoring the broader market challenge facing the tower's lease-up.
How Citadel Structured a Record Loan for a Regional Lender
To fund $36 million at closing while reserving the remaining $14 million for future leasing and tenant-improvement milestones, Citadel worked with Rhyze Solutions, which served as lender's agent to structure secondary lender participations after closing. Rhyze provided underwriting guidance for the secondary participation market and marketed portions of the financing to other financial institutions once the deal closed, per PR Newswire. That structure let Citadel originate and close the loan directly before spreading long-term risk across partner institutions, reducing the exposure ultimately retained on its own books.
The transaction is Citadel's third with CSB Holdings, reflecting an existing lending relationship between the two, and it sets a new transaction-size benchmark for the credit union's commercial lending business. Citadel, which has approximately $6.9 billion in assets, 25 branches and more than 290,000 members, has been expanding its presence in Philadelphia beyond consumer banking and community activities. That expansion follows a landmark October 2024 settlement, in which Citadel agreed to pay $6.5 million to resolve U.S. Department of Justice allegations of redlining — the first such agreement involving a credit union — after regulators alleged the institution systematically failed to provide mortgage lending in majority Black and Hispanic census tracts from 2017 to 2021, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer. As part of that settlement, Citadel committed $6 million in mortgage loan subsidies and agreed to open three Philadelphia branches.
